Page 34 of Fearless
I stared at him, bewildered. “What the fuck is going on?”
“It’s just Shadow having his nightmares. It sounds worse than it is, but yeah. This is what I have to deal with a few times a week.”
“Nightmares?” Another scream and unintelligible yelling made me flinch. “Thoseare nightmares?”
“Mm-hm.” His fingers moved over my skin, caressing and soothing. “When I told you to wait here for me, I went to close up over a dozen locks on his door. He’s not a violent guy when he’s awake, unless he’s doing his job. But when he sleeps, he’s uncontrollable. He’s destroyed so much shit in the house, dislocated my shoulder, given me black eyes. I fucking hate locking him in there, but we don’t see any other options.”
“Are so many locks necessary?”
“He’s ripped the door off the hinges. Twice.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.” Jandro kissed my hair as he ran his fingers through the long strands. “He’s my friend. I hate seeing him suffer, but he’s strong as fuck and dangerous when he’s like this. I just don’t know what else to do.”
Not a single brain cell was asleep in my head anymore. I mentally filed through everything I read about PTSD and the procession of trauma. God knew I researched the shit out of it, thanks to my dad.
“It isn’t nightmares,” I said after the thumping and yelling began to subside. “His brain is trying to process trauma from his past, probably from childhood. I’m only speculating, but from his screams…it sounds horribly abusive.”
Jandro didn’t speak for a long moment, his warm hands pausing their movements on my skin. “You’re right,” was all he said.
“Jandro.” I slid out of his warm embrace, propping my head up on my arm to look at him in the dark room. “What happened to him? I don’t specialize in this kind of thing but I might be able to help—“
“Mariposita,”he sighed. “I know you mean well, and I love that you’re so caring and patient with him. But you can’t help. His trauma runsdeep. It’s not just from his childhood, it’s all he’s known since the day he was born. And,” he hesitated, “your gender is an intrinsic part of that.”
“So he was abused by women,” I said matter-of-factly. “Since he was an infant?”
“Yes.”
“Family members, I assume?”
“Look, even I don’t know all the details,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I can, but please, Mari, you can’t push him. He’s come such a long way, but avoiding women is a safety thing for him. I know you have the best of intentions, but I can’t let him regress.”
“Trust me, I get it.” I snuggled back closer to him, realizing he’d much rather sleep than talk, but I was dying to know more. Maybe I’d have to be creative around helping Shadow, but there had to be some kind of way. “So what happened?”
“I don’t know specific methods of what they did to him, and don’t really care to,” Jandro murmured against my forehead. His fingers began a hypnotic, circular pattern on my back. “So, you saw where Reaper grew up, right?”
“Mm-hm.” I rested my lips on his warm shoulder.
“Well, his was one of maybe a dozen female-run communities that said 'fuck the patriarchy' for a number of reasons and decided to live their own way. Most of them were based here in Arizona, some stretched up to Utah.”
“Okay.” His voice vibrated in his chest as he spoke. I curled into him as I listened.
“So, as with all types of people, you have normal folks in the middle of a spectrum, then you have people at extreme ends. Reaper’s was considered pretty normal despite the polyandry thing, since they allowed men to live there too. Some communities didn’t allow men at all. And others were just fucking psychotic.”
I felt his heartbeat pick up speed, and I was certain mine did too.
“Psychotic in what way?”
“Like these women were fucking violent and deranged. I met Shadow when I worked in a prison, but those vile bitches should have been the ones locked up.” His tone deepened to one of anger. “They hated men and everything to do with us. They ran their communes like cults out of a horror movie.”
“So they would hurt men,” I realized. “And abuse them.”
“Even before I met Shadow, I heard rumors,” Jandro went on. “That they seduced men, drugged them, and sacrificed them to their culty goddess. I heard that if a woman got pregnant and the baby was a boy, they’d kill it on the spot.”
“Oh my god,” I blinked away tears. “Poor Shadow.”
“Local authorities said the same kind of shit about Reaper’s community, so who knows what details are true and what’s made up. But Shadow knew nothing but literal Hell his whole life until I brought him into the Demons. He’s never said a peep about what the cult did but,” he moved my hand up and over his shoulder, touching my fingers down on the gunshot wound I closed, “you can see the scars.”
